


Wings of Victory

by Maccabits



Category: Good Omens (TV), Good Omens - Neil Gaiman & Terry Pratchett
Genre: Angels and demons leave a lot of traces in Roman Archaeology, Angry Aziraphale (Good Omens), Crowley really is a good egg, Protective Crowley, Roma | Rome, The Arrangement (Good Omens), The Ineffable Plan (Good Omens), Wings of Victory, Worried Aziraphale (Good Omens)
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-07-06
Updated: 2019-07-06
Packaged: 2020-06-22 04:53:09
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,849
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19660216
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Maccabits/pseuds/Maccabits
Summary: True story: In 2008, archaeologists found a pair of life-size, carved marble wings on Rome's Palatine Hill, hidden in an ancient storage room in perfect condition. This is the story of how they got there and this is what they look like. https://www.daedalum.org/piwigo/picture.php?/5957-img_5429/tags/3516-forum_romain





	Wings of Victory

**Author's Note:**

> 1\. Ara Pacis = Altar of Peace. Commissioned by the Senate to honor the Emperor Augustus, originally supposed to be placed in the Senate House, but ended up on the Field of Mars next to Augustus' Mausoleum. Perhaps the finest example of marble carving in history.
> 
> 2\. In 25 B.C. Augustus left Rome to lead a campaign in Hispania. He got ill in the hamlet of Tarraco after a skirmish and left for Gaul.
> 
> 3\. A tepidarium is a swimming pool in a public bath house.
> 
> 4\. An atrium is an open-air courtyard in the middle of a house, typically with an open roof to allow rainwater. The impluvium is the pool which collects rainwater.

**"This one is born for peace, that one is useful for the arms of the camp: everyone follows the seeds of his nature."** -Propertius, Elegies (III.9.19)

Augustus was so very unhappy, and unfortunately, Aziraphale knew the reason. Personally, in fact, because that reason's name was Crowley. The Ara Pacis was not, so far, living up to its name.

It had begun like so many other heavenly missions. Aziraphale had been minding his angelic business, fomenting peace in the Roman Empire. He was doing it very well, too. He had managed to secure a centurion's spot, and even better, the favor of Augustus himself, and rode at his side in both Spain and Gaul as Rome's First Emperor sought to secure the whole peninsula. That said, the food was terrible, the work depressing, and the worst part was, Crowley had shown up. He always showed up for the Carthaginians, and this skirmish was really their people’s final hurrah.

It wasn't that Aziraphale didn't feel bad for the peoples of Hispania, because he very much did. Augustus was sacking the villages of many different peoples who had been gathered into the Carthaginian Empire over the past three hundred years. But he was not consulted on policy decisions and he had strict instructions from Head Office to assist Augustus. This was a piece of the Divine Plan that had been written out, specifically. Without the Roman Empire, there was no… well, it was quite a complicated plan. The gist was… help Augustus. Even if that meant helping Augustus dispatch a whole peninsula of people to the afterlife.

And how dare Crowley make him feel bad about it? Crowley always seemed to be taking up the cause of the underdog. Theologically, he supposed that made sense, to a point. Since Good will always triumph, Evil must be, by definition, the underdog? Again, it all got very confused.

Confused was not a good thing to be when one was trying to get a foothold in the Cantabrian mountains in northern Hispania, toe-to-toe with a noble villager fighting for his freedom and his nation. Aziraphale spent most of his time bucking up Augustus’ spirits, but of course he still had to fight in his guise as a centurion. He knew his way around a sword, but he rather hated using one. He’d prefer to give them away, or you know, convert them into plowshares.

So when he came across Crowley in the narrow, hilly battlefield, leading a rag-tag bunch of Tarracan guerilla fighters, he felt rather pissed off. It had been a long and dispiriting winter, waiting to fight this battle. Could Crowley not give it a rest for just one significant skirmish? He said to Augustus, “My Lord, allow me to take the one with the black shield.” And before Augustus could respond Aziraphale spurred his horse, and rode towards the demon at full speed, sword unsheathed and dagger at the ready in his left hand.

“Well, hello Azira -” Crowley had shouted out the greeting well ahead of their horses meeting, but Aziraphale sped forward to strike a powerful first blow, hitting partly on the shield, and partly on Crowley’s left shoulder. The demon’s eyes widened in surprise, and pain. Aziraphale struck again, an equally successful blow, drawing blood, and something fierce, too, from the demon’s face, where fierceness had not been a moment before. Wordlessly, Crowley struck Aziraphale across the breastplate, knocking the breath from him. The horses, sensing their masters’ engagement with one another, reared up and pawed at each other, and both of their masters hurtled to the ground, lucky to be merely toppled and not trampled.

Crowley crawled over to Aziraphale, his Carthaginian armor lighter than the Roman centurion’s garb. On one knee in a flash, he pulled a dagger from his holster and held it to Aziraphale’s throat.

“Angel?” he said angrily, but nevertheless, its tone a question.

Aziraphale gazed back at him, resigned. He would miss this body, it would be a mountain of paperwork, but it might get him out of this horrible war, this horrible assignment, killing all these poor people…

“Do it,” he said evenly.

Crowley looked at him with those yellow irises enveloping the whites of his eyes, enveloping Aziraphale… and dropped him to the ground.

“Retreat!,” he called out to the villagers, “Collect the injured!”

Aziraphale laid on the ground until they left, and then collected his injured. The Romans had won the skirmish, but Augustus looked as sick as Aziraphale felt. “I think you are over-exerted, My Lord. Perhaps it’s time we moved on to Gaul and focused on the administrative reorganization?” Lord knew they were both better at admin than fighting.

“You may be right, Marcus Azirius,” Augustus said, wearily.

It was still years before they returned to Rome, Hispania and Gaul completely in Augustus’ thrall. The moment they reached Ostia, Augustus granted Aziraphale a short leave of absence and Aziraphale planned on a long soak in the public baths and a large meal before he reported to Head Office. He had accomplished the former, and now was working on the latter. Any rich man would do, he just needed to be throwing a proper banquet - the five-hour kind with the 30 courses and a convenient vomitorium round the back.  
Before he could sidle over to the tepidarium to wrangle a senator into a dinner invite, he was beckoned by a bath slave to the massage area. He cursed himself for a fool and began to head for an exit the moment he recognized an angular pair of shoulder blades being worked upon, and a crop of short ginger hair.

“Aziraphale, wait!” In an instant the demon was upright and dismissing the bath attendant with a wave. “I have something for you.”

Aziraphale demanded, “What are you doing here? What do you want - our side won this one!”

Crowley’s tone was low and mild. “Things didn’t end so well with us last time,” he said. “And I have something for you,” he repeated.

Crowley's slaves bowed low and pulled back the linen curtains before retreating altogether from the chamber. A pair of wings, intricately carved down to the last feather barb, and of true angel-span, were mounted on a silver block with iron rods, as if they were in mid-flight. Aziraphale recognized that they were carved of Greek Parian marble, the purest marble in the world, free from veins of inferior material. And down to a feather, they looked the very image of Aziraphale's own.

"A peace offering, Angel."

Stunned, Aziraphale could only look at Crowley, so stricken that Crowley feared Aziraphale might cry. Not the reaction he was trying for. (Not that he EVER got the reaction he was trying for with Aziraphale, but he was skilled at playing the long game. One had to be, with this angel in particular.)

"Relax! It's not a betrothal ring! Just a silly present. You don't have to accept it if you don't want to."

Aziraphale had moved over to the wings to examine their handiwork, brushing his palms against feathers that looked so lifelike. "But why this? And for me?" He turned to the demon, lower lip frozen mid-quiver. He was so tired.

"It's a promise," Crowley said, "a promise that I'll never threaten to discorporate you. We have too much in common."

Aziraphale's first impulse was to challenge that latter assertion, but he held his tongue.

"Crowley, I can't make the same promise," he said. "I have to follow orders. If Heaven - "

"Angel. It's a promise from me to you, not an agreement between us. I’m not asking you to do the same."

There was a long silence as Crowley added nothing further and Aziraphale struggled to make sense of what had just happened. The conversation must be unprecedented in the annals of demon/angel relations. Nor could he form a plausible theory as to what Crowley could gain from such a gift. If anything, it most resembled God's promise to mankind, sealed with a rainbow. But better because Crowley had never harmed him; it was a promise to _never_ harm, not to never harm again. Aziraphale quickly banished that blasphemous thought, only to find another, equally perverse one in its place. Was Crowley trying to thwart him… with kindness?

The silence continued, but Crowley was reading him. He struggled to think of response; it seemed a step too far to acknowledge the demon’s grand gesture directly. Aziraphale decided to approach it from a side angle.

"Where will I put it?" he worried aloud.

"Aren't you Augustus' right-hand centurion commander?" Crowley reminded him. "Why not ask if you can keep it in the palace, in your room?"

In fact, Aziraphale's cubiculum was quite small; but he had an idea. There was an atrium with a lovely impluvium beneath an open roof, which his room opened to. The wings would be bathed in the sun’s spotlight, the night’s moonshine and be cleaned by heavenly showers. As his own wings used to be. As Crowley’s used to be, too, so long ago.

“I’ll figure out something,” he said. “Thank you, Crowley,” he said, far too formally, but with a smile deep enough for his dimples to appear.

That was enough for Crowley; he reckoned he should leave on that note. “Mmpf,” he said. “See ya ‘round, Angel…”

It took some time to arrange movement of the wings. He was so afraid of jarring those delicate tips, and breaking a point off. In the end, he used cheesecloth wrapping, with a slave holding them upright in a cart that was pulled slowly up the Palatine and left outside the back gate. A teeny miracle helped the path to the palace smooth itself out.

Aziraphale had no soon entered Augustus’ house with his gift when he could sense a storm brewing. There was no feeling of love here presently. Augustus didn’t even greet him; he was apparently in a bit of a rant.

“The fucking altar is still not finished!" he addressed the world at large. "I was promised a spot within the Senate House for it, to celebrate my Gaul and Hispania triumph. It’ll never happen now, not with Decius Maximus due to lead the senators come this calends. Fucking stonemasons. They knew it to be their number one priority, that it had to be perfect and also fast. That’s why I paid so dearly. And yet… their work has been so slow I wonder if some private citizen hasn’t tried to thwart my senatorial honor through bribery and malice!”

Aziraphale had been at his side long enough to know Augustus' obsession with recognition; a whole Empire was being assembled to fill that particular hole. And with Augustus’ chance use of the word “thwart”, he had a sinking feeling. About Crowley and who he may have employed in the creation of the angel’s present.

Augustus finally looked up, taking in Aziraphale, the cart, the slaves, and the large object covered in cheesecloth.

“What’s that?” he asked his centurion.

“Nothing of importance, my Lord,” said Aziraphale, tightening the knot holding the cheesecloth fast.


End file.
